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Longtime Whitehouse correspondent Helen Thomas (George Washington referred to her as the "olde woman in scarlet in the front row") is complaining that the downsizing of "old media" may result in journalism that is "less reliable" than what she's helped spoonfeed the public.
And she's right in the sense that oldschool, mainstream media really can be relied on...to get the story wrong. A recent study shows that only 29% of Americans think that journalists get their facts straight, and only 26% of Americans think the mainstream media is politically unbiased.
Still, rather than having a bunch of "citizen journalists" using computer technology to bring stories (especially conservative stories) to light, Helen thinks the American people would be better served by relying on good old-fashioned presidential press conferences. Unfortunately, the president of "transparency" has refused to give such a press conference for over nine months now.
That's long enough for a woman to have a baby. Or, and we don't want to name any names, several thousand tadpoles.
"Gibbs-it! Gibbs-it! Gibbs-it!"
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Liberal lexicographers have been cracking their knuckles and getting up to new mischief in the Obama Whitehouse. Previously, they've declared that the 9/11 attacks weren't acts of terror, but were instead a "man-caused disaster." Similarly, there is no "war on terror," but only "overseas contingency operations."
Seizing the fierce urgency of inanity, the Obama administration is now floating the idea that the words "Muslim" and "Islamic" must be struck from strategic documents, and no terrorists will be described as being Muslim or Islamic, no matter which deity's name they were shrieking when they self-detonated.
Let's be clear: the war on terror has never been a "war on Islam," and only the intellectually lazy would judge an entire faith based on the actions of its worst and most radical elements.
But words mean something, and failing to identify Islamic terrorists as Islamic shows a continuing and dangerous lack of seriousness on the part of this president. Failing to acknowledge the common thread among terrorist attacks effectively prevents our intelligence and security officials from identifying or acting on any threats that are larger than the actions of individuals.
You can't "connect the dots" if you insist that they're only dots.
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Barack Obama has just announced his new "Nuclear Posture Review" for the United States. And the posture is, pretty much, to grab our collective ankles.
The review explicitly lays out the rules for anyone who wants to attack the United States without worrying about getting nuked in return. Poison gas? No problem! Cropdusters with anthrax? Bring it on!
The president's reasoning seems to be that there will be less incentive for rogue states to acquire nuclear weapons if we assure them that they can use non-nuclear weapons on us in relative safety. No, really!
In Obama's land of unicorns and rainbows, a world with fewer nukes is a wonderful place to live, even with the occasional smallpox attack or water system spiked with cyanide. Whether that will be true in the real world is something we just became much more likely to find out...
